Current Books Reading

These are the books I’m reading right now. I often have an e-book from the library, a paper book from either my shelf or the library, and an active read-aloud book.

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Revenant Gun	Yoon Ha Lee	Shuos Jedao is awake… …and nothing is as he remembers. He’s a teenager, a cadet-a nobody-in the body of an old man; a general in command of an elite force. And he’s the most feared, and reviled, man in the galaxy. Jedao carries orders from Hexarch Nirai Kujen to re-conquer the fractured pieces of the hexarchate. But he has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general, and the Kel soldiers under his command hate him for a massacre he can’t remember committing. Kujen’s friendliness can’t hide the fact that he’s a tyrant. And what’s worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted-by an enemy who knows more about Jedao than he does himself…
	A Wind in the Door	Madeleine L’Engle	14-year-old Meg Murry is worried about her brother Charles Wallace, a 6-year-old genius bullied at school by the other children. The new principal of the elementary school is the former high school principal, Mr. Jenkins, who often disciplined Meg, and Meg is sure has a grudge against her whole family.
	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero. And granny’s stories, of knights and princesses and dragons and castles, are her superpower. Because, as Elsa is starting to learn, heroes and villains don’t always exist in imaginary kingdoms; they could live just down the hallway. As Christmas draws near, even the best superhero grandmothers may have one or two things they’d like to apologise for. And, in the process, Elsa can have some breath-taking adventures of her own . . .

Last 5 Books Read

These are the last 5 books that I’ve finished.

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Vicious	V.E. Schwab	A fantasy novel focused around two college students who learn how to create superhuman abilities and later become archenemies.
	Raven Stratagem	Yoon Ha Lee	When the hexarchate’s gifted young captain Kel Cheris summoned the ghost of the long-dead General Shuos Jedao to help her put down a rebellion, she didn’t reckon on his breaking free of centuries of imprisonment - and possessing her. Even worse, the enemy Hafn are invading, and Jedao takes over General Kel Khiruev’s fleet, which was tasked with stopping them. Only one of Khiruev’s subordinates, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan, seems to be able to resist the influence of the brilliant but psychotic Jedao. Jedao claims to be interested in defending the hexarchate, but can Khiruev or Brezan trust him? For that matter, will the hexarchate’s masters wipe out the entire fleet to destroy the rogue general?
	The Redemption of Wolf 302	Rick McIntyre	From the renowned wolf researcher and author of The Rise of Wolf 8 and The Reign of Wolf 21 comes a stunning account of an unconventional alpha male.
	Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb	In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts.
	A Wrinkle in Time	Madeleine L’Engle	The story of Meg Murry, a high-school-aged girl who is transported on an adventure through time and space with her younger brother Charles Wallace and her friend Calvin O’Keefe to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from the evil forces that hold him prisoner on another planet.

Richard Wagamese

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Keeper’n Me	Richard Wagamese	When Garnet Raven was three years old, he was taken from his home on an Ojibway Indian reserve and placed in a series of foster homes. Having reached his mid-teens, he escapes at the first available opportunity, only to find himself cast adrift on the streets of the big city. Having skirted the urban underbelly once too often by age 20, he finds himself thrown in jail. While there, he gets a surprise letter from his long-forgotten native family. The sudden communication from his past spurs him to return to the reserve following his release from jail. Deciding to stay awhile, his life is changed completely as he comes to discover his sense of place, and of self. While on the reserve, Garnet is initiated into the ways of the Ojibway–both ancient and modern–by Keeper, a friend of his grandfather, and last fount of history about his people’s ways.
	Ragged Company	Richard Wagamese	Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck. A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed.
	Indian Horse	Richard Wagamese	Saul Indian Horse is dying. Tucked away in a hospice high above the clash and clang of a big city, he embarks on a marvellous journey of imagination back through the life he led as a northern Ojibway, with all its sorrows and joys. With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he’s sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement.
	Medicine Walk	Richard Wagamese	Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, Eldon. He’s sixteen years old and has had the most fleeting of relationships with the man. The rare moments they’ve shared haunt and trouble Frank, but he answers the call, a son’s duty to a father. What ensues is a journey through the rugged and beautiful backcountry, and a journey into the past, as the two men push forward to Eldon’s end. From a poverty-stricken childhood, to the Korean War, and later the derelict houses of mill towns, Eldon relates both the desolate moments of his life and a time of redemption and love, and in doing so offers Frank a history he has never known, the father he has never had, and a connection to himself he never expected.
	Starlight	Richard Wagamese	Frank Starlight has long settled into a quiet life working his remote farm, occasionally venturing into the unbroken country around his property to photograph the wild animals who thrive there. His contemplative existence comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of Emmy, a woman on the run who has committed a desperate act so she and her child can escape a life of abuse. Frank takes in Emmy and her daughter to help them get back on their feet, and, gradually, this accidental family grows into a real one. But Emmy’s violent ex-boyfriend isn’t content to just let her go. He wants revenge and is determined to hunt her down. An instant national bestseller, Starlight was unfinished at the time of Richard Wagamese’s death, yet every page radiates with his masterful storytelling, intense humanism, and insights that are as hard-earned as they are beautiful. With astonishing scenes set in the rugged backcountry of the B.C. Interior, and characters whose scars cut deep even as their journey toward healing and forgiveness lifts us, Starlight is a magnificent last gift to readers from a writer who believed in the power of stories to save us.
	A Perfect Likeness	Richard Wagamese	The volume brings together two previously published novellas by Richard Wagamese, Him Standing and The Next Sure Thing, with a foreword from author Waubgeshig Rice. Both stories follow the lives of young men who have dreams for a better future. In their search for fame and fortune, Cree Thunderboy and Lucas Smoke end up on paths where their biggest challenge is staying true to themselves. In Him Standing, Lucas Smoke learns the art of carving from his grandfather. He discovers that he is a natural; he can literally make people come to life in wood. But when Lucas is asked to carve a spirit mask by a mysterious stranger, he quickly learns that his skill with a knife could cost him his dreams. In The Next Sure Thing, Cree Thunderboy has two things he does well: playing blues guitar and picking winning horses at the track. Picking winners is just meant to be a means to an end—Cree’s goal is to make his living playing the blues. He meets a powerful man at the racetrack who convinces him he can parlay his special skill with the horses into a shot at the fame and fortune he seeks.

Fredrik Backman

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d’etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents’ Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so? In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible…
	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero. And granny’s stories, of knights and princesses and dragons and castles, are her superpower. Because, as Elsa is starting to learn, heroes and villains don’t always exist in imaginary kingdoms; they could live just down the hallway. As Christmas draws near, even the best superhero grandmothers may have one or two things they’d like to apologise for. And, in the process, Elsa can have some breath-taking adventures of her own . . .
	Britt-Marie Was Here	Fredrik Backman	For as long as anyone can remember, Britt-Marie has been an acquired taste. It’s not that she’s judgemental, or fussy, or difficult - she just expects things to be done in a certain way. A cutlery drawer should be arranged in the right order, for example (forks, knives, then spoons). We’re not animals, are we? But behind the passive-aggressive, socially awkward, absurdly pedantic busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams and a warmer heart than anyone around her realizes. So when Britt-Marie finds herself unemployed, separated from her husband of 20 years, left to fend for herself in the miserable provincial backwater that is Borg - of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it - and somehow tasked with running the local football team, she is a little unprepared. But she will learn that life may have more to offer her that she’s ever realised, and love might be found in the most unexpected of places.
	Beartown	Fredrik Backman	People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys. Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected. Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
	Us Against You	Fredrik Backman	After everything that the citizens of Beartown have gone through, they are struck yet another blow when they hear that their beloved local junior hockey team will soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in Hed, take in that fact. As the tension between the two towns simmers, a surprising newcomer is handpicked to try to save the Beartown club. Soon a new team starts to take shape around Amat, the fastest player you’ll ever see; Benji, the intense lone wolf; and Vidar, a born-to-be-bad troublemaker. But bringing this team together proves to be a challenge as old bonds are broken, new ones are formed, and the enmity with Hed grows more and more heated. As the big game between Beartown and Hed approaches, the not-so-innocent pranks and incidents between the communities pile up. By the time the last game is finally played, a resident of Beartown will be dead, and the people of both towns will be forced to wonder if, after all they’ve been through, the game they love can ever return to something simple and innocent.
	Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	A poignant comedy about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find A poignant comedy about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined. Viewing an apartment normally doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers begin slowly opening up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.they have more in common than they ever imagined.
	The Winners	Fredrik Backman	Over the course of two weeks, everything in Beartown will change. Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake. Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The destruction caused by a ferocious late-summer storm reignites the old rivalry between Beartown and the neighboring town of Hed, a rivalry which has always been fought through their ice hockey teams. Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, are caught up in an investigation of the hockey club’s murky finances, and Amat—once the star of the Beartown team—has lost his way after an injury and a failed attempt to get drafted into the NHL. Simmering tensions between the two towns turn into acts of intimidation and then violence. All the while, a fourteen-year-old boy grows increasingly alienated from this hockey-obsessed community and is determined to take revenge on the people he holds responsible for his beloved sister’s death. He has a pistol and a plan that will leave Beartown with a loss that is almost more that it can stand.

Becky Chambers

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet	Becky Chambers	When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn’t expecting much. The ship, which has seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past. But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species and personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful - exactly what Rosemary wants. Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They’ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years… if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful. But Rosemary isn’t the only person on board with secrets to hide, and the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.
	A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers	Lovelace was once merely a ship’s artificial intelligence. When she wakes up in an new body, following a total system shut-down and reboot, she has to start over in a synthetic body, in a world where her kind are illegal. She’s never felt so alone. But she’s not alone, not really. Pepper, one of the engineers who risked life and limb to reinstall Lovelace, is determined to help her adjust to her new world. Because Pepper knows a thing or two about starting over. Together, Pepper and Lovey will discover that, huge as the galaxy may be, it’s anything but empty.
	Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers	Centuries after the last humans left Earth, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, a place many are from but few outsiders have seen. Humanity has finally been accepted into the galactic community, but while this has opened doors for many, those who have not yet left for alien cities fear that their carefully cultivated way of life is under threat. Tessa chose to stay home when her brother Ashby left for the stars, but has to question that decision when her position in the Fleet is threatened. Kip, a reluctant young apprentice, itches for change but doesn’t know where to find it. Sawyer, a lost and lonely newcomer, is just looking for a place to belong. And when a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home can no longer avoid the inescapable question:
	To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers	At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in sub-zero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to explore neighbouring exoplanets long suspected to harbour life. Ariadne is one such explorer. On a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds fifteen light-years from Earth, she and her fellow crewmates sleep while in transit, and wake each time with different features. But as they shift through both form and time, life back on Earth has also changed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the wonders and dangers of her journey, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.
	The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers	When a freak technological failure halts traffic to and from the planet Gora, three strangers are thrown together unexpectedly, with seemingly nothing to do but wait. Pei is a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, torn between her duty to her people, and her duty to herself. Roveg is an exiled artist, with a deeply urgent, and longed for, family appointment to keep. Speaker has never been far from her twin but now must endure the unendurable: separation. Under the care of Ouloo, an enterprising alien, and Tupo, her occasionally helpful child, the trio are compelled to confront where they’ve been, where they might go, and what they might be to one another.
	A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers	It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
	A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers	After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe.

Thomas King

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Medicine River	Thomas King	When Will returns to Medicine River, he thinks he is simply attending his mother’s funeral. He doesn’t count on Harlen Bigbear and his unique brand of community planning. Harlen tries to sell Will on the idea of returning to Medicine River to open shop as the town’s only Native photographer. Somehow, that’s exactly what happens. Through Will’s gentle and humorous narrative, we come to know Medicine River, a small Albertan town bordering a Blackfoot reserve. And we meet its people: the basketball team; Louise Heavyman and her daughter, South Wing; Martha Oldcrow, the marriage doctor; Joe Bigbear, Harlen’s world-travelling, storytelling brother; Bertha Morley, who has a short fling with a Calgary dating service; and David Plume, who went to Wounded Knee. At the centre of it all is Harlen, advising and pestering, annoying and entertaining, gossiping and benevolently interfering in the lives of his friends and neighbours.
	Green Grass, Running Water	Thomas King	Strong, sassy women and hard-luck, hard-headed men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by award-winning author Thomas King. Alberta, Eli, Lionel and others are coming to the Blackfoot reservation for the Sun Dance. There they will encounter four Indian elders and their companion, the trickster Coyote—and nothing in the small town of Blossom will be the same again. . . .
	The Back of the Turtle	Thomas King	When Gabriel Quinn, a brilliant scientist, abandons his laboratory and returns to Smoke River Reserve, where his mother and sister lived, he finds that almost everyone in the community has disappeared. Even the sea turtles are gone, poisoned by an environmental disaster known as The Ruin. The fact is, Gabriel was the chief architect of the disaster and he has come to Smoke River to witness the destruction he created and to drown himself in the sea. But as he prepares to let the water take him, he sees a young girl in the waves. Plunging in, he saves her and is soon saving others. Who are these people, with their long black hair and almond eyes, who seem to have fallen from the sky?
	Indians on Vacation	Thomas King	Inspired by a handful of postcards sent nearly a hundred years ago, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace long-lost uncle Leroy and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.
	Sufferance	Thomas King	Jeremiah Camp, a.k.a. the Forecaster, can look into the heart of humanity and see the patterns that create opportunities and profits for the rich and powerful. Problem is, Camp has looked one too many times, has seen what he hadn’t expected to see and has come away from the abyss with no hope for himself or for the future. So Jeremiah does what any intelligent, sensitive person would do. He runs away. Goes into hiding in a small town, at an old residential school on an even smaller Indian reserve with no phone, no Internet, no television. With the windows shut, the door locked, the mailbox removed to discourage any connection with the world, he feels safe at last. Except nobody told the locals that they should leave Jeremiah alone. And then his past comes calling. Ash Locken, head of the Locken Group, the multinational consortium that Jeremiah has fled, arrives on his doorstep with a simple proposition. She wants our hero to formulate one more forecast, and she’s not about to take no for an answer. Before he left the Locken empire, Jeremiah had put together a list of twelve names, every one a billionaire. The problem is the people on the list are dying at an alarming and unnatural rate. And Ash Locken wants to know why.

The Expanse

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	Humanity has colonized the solar system—Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond—but the stars are still out of our reach. Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for—and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why. Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything. Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations—and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.
	Caliban’s War	James S.A. Corey	We are not alone. On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system. In the vast wilderness of space, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have been keeping the peace for the Outer Planets Alliance. When they agree to help a scientist search war-torn Ganymede for a missing child, the future of humanity rests on whether a single ship can prevent an alien invasion that may have already begun . . .
	Abaddon’s Gate	James S.A. Corey	For generations, the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt – was humanity’s great frontier. Until now. The alien artifact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has appeared in Uranus’s orbit, where it has built a massive gate that leads to a starless dark. Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artifact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to find whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them.
	Cibola Burn	James S.A. Corey	The gates have opened the way to a thousand new worlds and the rush to colonize has begun. Settlers looking for a new life stream out from humanity’s home planets. Ilus, the first human colony on this vast new frontier, is being born in blood and fire. Independent settlers stand against the overwhelming power of a corporate colony ship with only their determination, courage, and the skills learned in the long wars of home. Innocent scientists are slaughtered as they try to survey a new and alien world. The struggle on Ilus threatens to spread all the way back to Earth. James Holden and the crew of his one small ship are sent to make peace in the midst of war and sense in the midst of chaos. But the more he looks at it, the more Holden thinks the mission was meant to fail. And the whispers of a dead man remind him that the great galactic civilization that once stood on this land is gone. And that something killed it.
	Nemesis Games	James S.A. Corey	A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle. Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining protomolecule sample is stolen. Terrorist attacks previously considered impossible bring the inner planets to their knees. The sins of the past are returning to exact a terrible price. And as a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.
	Babylon’s Ashes	James S.A. Corey	A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood. The Free Navy – a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships – has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network. But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun.
	Persepolis Rising	James S.A. Corey	An old enemy returns. In the thousand-sun network of humanity’s expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace. In the vast space between Earth and Jupiter, the inner planets and belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance still haunted by a history of wars and prejudices. On the lost colony world of Laconia, a hidden enemy has a new vision for all of humanity and the power to enforce it. New technologies clash with old as the history of human conflict returns to its ancient patterns of war and subjugation. But human nature is not the only enemy, and the forces being unleashed have their own price. A price that will change the shape of humanity – and of the Rocinante – unexpectedly and forever. . .
	Tiamat’s Wrath	James S.A. Corey	Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper. In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay. At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father’s godlike ambition. The sociopathic scientist Paolo Cordozar and the Mephistophelian prisoner James Holden are only two of the dangers in a palace thick with intrigue, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn’t guess. And throughout the wide human empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante fights a brave rear-guard action against Duarte’s authoritarian regime. Memory of the old order falls away, and a future under Laconia’s eternal rule – and with it, a battle that humanity can only lose – seems more and more certain. Because against the terrors that lie between worlds, courage and ambition will not be enough. . .
	Leviathan Falls	James S.A. Corey	The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the thirteen hundred solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again. In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight of her investigation. Through the wide-flung systems of humanity, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing daughter. . . and the shattered emperor himself. And on the Rocinante, James Holden and his crew struggle to build a future for humanity out of the shards and ruins of all that has come before. As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win. But the price of victory may be worse than the cost of defeat.
	Memory’s Legion	James S.A. Corey	On Mars, a scientist experiments with a new engine that will one day become the drive that fuels humanity’s journey into the stars. On an asteroid station, a group of prisoners are oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them. On a future Earth beset by overpopulation, pollution, and poverty, a crime boss desperately seeks to find a way off planet. On an alien world, a human family struggles to establish a colony and make a new home. All these stories and more are featured in this unmissable collection of short fiction set in the hardscrabble world of The Expanse.

The Murderbot Diaries

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	All Systems Red	Martha Wells	In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ’droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.
	Artificial Condition	Martha Wells	It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…
	Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells	Sci-fi’s favorite antisocial A.I. is back on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.
	Exit Strategy	Martha Wells	Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help the only human who ever showed it respect must be a system glitch, right? Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it’s caught?
	Network Effect	Martha Wells	You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you’re a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you’re Murderbot. When Murderbot’s human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.
	Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells	When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people—who knew?) Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans! Again!

The Broken Earth Trilogy

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.
	The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin	The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night. Essun – once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger – has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead there is Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, with a request. But if Essun does what he asks, it would seal the fate of the Stillness forever. Far away, her daughter Nassun is growing in power – and her choices will break the world.
	The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin	The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

The Oxford Time Travel Series

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.
	To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop’s bird stump. It’s part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right—not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
	Blackout	Connie Willis	Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, and dive-bombing Stukas—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.
	All Clear	Connie Willis	Traveling back in time, from Oxford circa 2060 into the thick of World War II, was a routine excursion for three British historians eager to study firsthand the heroism and horrors of the Dunkirk evacuation and the London Blitz. But getting marooned in war-torn 1940 England has turned Michael Davies, Merope Ward, and Polly Churchill from temporal tourists into besieged citizens struggling to survive Hitler’s devastating onslaught. And now there’s more to worry about than just getting back home: The impossibility of altering past events has always been a core belief of time-travel theory—but it may be tragically wrong. When discrepancies in the historical record begin cropping up, it suggests that one or all of the future visitors have somehow changed the past—and, ultimately, the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the stranded historians’ supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, frantically confronts the seemingly impossible task of rescuing his students—three missing needles in the haystack of history.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Three-Body Problem	Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 3	Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.
	The Dark Forest	Cixin Liu	In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion-in just four centuries’ time. The aliens’ human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth’s defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he’s the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.
	Death’s End	Cixin Liu	Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent. Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Hyperion Cantos

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Hyperion	Dan Simmons	On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
	The Fall of Hyperion	Dan Simmons	On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same.
	Endymion	Dan Simmons	Two hundred and seventy-four years after the fall of the WorldWeb in Fall of Hyperion, Raoul Endymion is sent on a quest. Retrieving Aenea from the Sphinx before the Church troops reach her is only the beginning. With help from a blue-skinned android named A. Bettik, Raoul and Aenea travel the river Tethys, pursued by Father Captain Frederico DeSoya, an influential warrior-priest and his troops. The shrike continues to make enigmatic appearances, and while many questions were raised in Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, still more are raised here. Raoul’s quest will continue.
	The Rise of Endymion	Dan Simmons	The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her startling message to her growing army of disciples. But first they must embark on a final spectacular mission to discover the underlying meaning of the universe itself. They have been followed on their journey by the mysterious Shrike–monster, angel, killing machine–who is about to reveal the long-held secret of its origin and purpose. And on the planet of Hyperion, where the story first began, the final revelation will be delivered–an apocalyptic message that unlocks the secrets of existence and the fate of humankind in the galaxy.

The Imperial Radch

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren—a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
	Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	Breq is a soldier who used to be a warship. Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she has only a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to go to the only place in the galaxy she would agree to go: to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew – a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.
	Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	For a moment, things seemed to be under control for Breq, the soldier who used to be a warship. Then a search of Athoek Station’s slums turns up someone who shouldn’t exist, and a messenger from the mysterious Presger empire arrives, as does Breq’s enemy, the divided and quite possibly insane Anaander Mianaai – ruler of an empire at war with itself. Breq refuses to flee with her ship and crew, because that would leave the people of Athoek in terrible danger. The odds aren’t good, but that’s never stopped her before.

Teixcalaan

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine	Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn’t an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court. Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan’s unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.
	A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine	An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options. In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass—still reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empire—face the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity. Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaan’s destruction—and allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion. Or it might create something far stranger . . .

The Machineries of Empire

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee	When Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Kel Command gives her a chance to redeem herself, by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake: if the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next. Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress. The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own. As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao – because she might be his next victim.
	Raven Stratagem	Yoon Ha Lee	When the hexarchate’s gifted young captain Kel Cheris summoned the ghost of the long-dead General Shuos Jedao to help her put down a rebellion, she didn’t reckon on his breaking free of centuries of imprisonment - and possessing her. Even worse, the enemy Hafn are invading, and Jedao takes over General Kel Khiruev’s fleet, which was tasked with stopping them. Only one of Khiruev’s subordinates, Lieutenant Colonel Kel Brezan, seems to be able to resist the influence of the brilliant but psychotic Jedao. Jedao claims to be interested in defending the hexarchate, but can Khiruev or Brezan trust him? For that matter, will the hexarchate’s masters wipe out the entire fleet to destroy the rogue general?
	Revenant Gun	Yoon Ha Lee	Shuos Jedao is awake… …and nothing is as he remembers. He’s a teenager, a cadet-a nobody-in the body of an old man; a general in command of an elite force. And he’s the most feared, and reviled, man in the galaxy. Jedao carries orders from Hexarch Nirai Kujen to re-conquer the fractured pieces of the hexarchate. But he has no memory of ever being a soldier, let alone a general, and the Kel soldiers under his command hate him for a massacre he can’t remember committing. Kujen’s friendliness can’t hide the fact that he’s a tyrant. And what’s worse, Jedao and Kujen are being hunted-by an enemy who knows more about Jedao than he does himself…

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Mountains Sing	Nguyen Phan Que Mai	An enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Tr<U+1EA7>n family, set against the backdrop of the Vi<U+1EC7>t Nam War. Tr<U+1EA7>n Di<U+1EC7>u Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà N<U+1ED9>i, her young granddaughter, Huong, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the H<U+1ED3> Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family.
	What Strange Paradise	Omar El Akkad	More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vanna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him.
	The Strangers	Katherena Vermette	The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
	The Overstory	Richard Powers	The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of–and paean to–the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours–fast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
	A Master of Djinn	P. Djeli Clark	Al-Jahiz transformed the world 50 years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions.
	Once There Were Wolves	Charlotte McConaghy	The unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.
	The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois	Honoree Fanonne Jeffers	Spanning two hundred years, it takes an intimate look at race, feminism, love, and family as told by a line of unforgettable Black women from America’s South. It focuses on a fictional African American family in Georgia, beginning before the state was Georgia.
	Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel	In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the west coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording.
	An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon	Rivers Solomon’s novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers.
	The Invisible Life of Addie Larue	V.E. Schwab	France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures	Merlin Sheldrake	When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
	A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey	Jonathan Meiburg	An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history.
	Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey	James Rebanks	The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family’s traditional English farm
	Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life	Lulu Miller	David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him.
	Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest	Suzanne Simard	Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
	Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life	Anne Lamott	“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
	People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present	Dara Horn	Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.
	Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
	The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human	Siddhartha Mukherjee	In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
	Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb	In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts.

Stats

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
	Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi	Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive.
	The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets–an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
	Migrations	Charlotte McConaghy	Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny’s dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption?
	Go, Went, Gone	Jenny Erpenbeck	The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.
	Greenwood	Michael Christie	They come for the trees. It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and rapacious timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.
	The Brothers K	David James Duncan	This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties and who each choose their own way to deal with what the world has become.
	Five Little Indians	Michelle Good	Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention. Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.
	Cloud Cuckoo Land	Anthony Doerr	In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross. In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.
	Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman	The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever–if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life. But if she does, she’ll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship–and even love–after all, if only she can learn to open her heart.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Truth About Stories	Thomas King	“Stories are wondrous things,” award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. “And they are dangerous.” Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America’s relationship with its Native peoples.
	Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich	On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown - from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster - and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.
	Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine	James Maskalyk	Deeply personal in its scope, doctor and activist James Maskalyk–author of the highly acclaimed Six Months in Sudan–draws upon his experience treating patients in the world’s emergency rooms. From Toronto to Addis Ababa, Cambodia to Bolivia, he discovers that although the cultures, resources and medical challenges of each hospital may differ, they are linked indelibly by the ground floor: the location of their emergency rooms. Here, on the ground floor, is where Dr. Maskalyk witnesses the story of “human aliveness”–our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it’s here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor.
	Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers	Andy Greenberg	The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.
	Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family	Amanda Jette Knox	An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family–a family who shows what’s possible when you “lead with love.”
	Underland: A Deep Time Journey	Robert Macfarlane	In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future.
	Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang	An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution.
	Educated	Tara Westover	Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school. Westover’s mother proved a marvel at concocting folk remedies for many ailments. As Tara developed her own coping mechanisms, little by little, she started to realize that what her family was offering didn’t have to be her only education. Her first day of university was her first day in school—ever—and she would eventually win an esteemed fellowship from Cambridge and graduate with a PhD in intellectual history and political thought.
	A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life	George Saunders	For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
	Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Patrick Radden Keefe	The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.

Stats

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson	In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy’s fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse’s crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a “data haven” in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe’s tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty…or to universal totalitarianism reborn.
	Shades of Grey	Jasper Fforde	Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one’s limited color perception. And Eddie Russet wants to move up. But his plans to leverage his better-than-average red perception and marry into a powerful family are quickly upended. Juggling inviolable rules, sneaky Yellows, and a risky friendship with an intriguing Grey named Jane who shows Eddie that the apparent peace of his world is as much an illusion as color itself, Eddie finds he must reckon with the cruel regime behind this gaily painted façade.
	The Left Hand Of Darkness	Ursula K Le Guin	A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters…
	A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles	In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
	Roots	Alex Haley	The story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.
	The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead	Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
	The Book of Negroes	Lawrence Hill	Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone—passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America—is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.
	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it.
	Piranesi	Susanna Clarke	Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
	The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel	Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. The owner of the hotel is New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later, Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Body: A Guide for Occupants	Bill Bryson	Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body–how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you, in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, “we pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.” The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information.
	One Native Life	Richard Wagamese	In 2005, award-winning writer Richard Wagamese moved with his partner to a cabin outside Kamloops, B.C. In the crisp mountain air Wagamese felt a peace he’d seldom known before. Abused and abandoned as a kid, he’d grown up feeling there was nowhere he belonged. For years, only alcohol and moves from town to town seemed to ease the pain. In One Native Life, Wagamese looks back down the road he has travelled in reclaiming his identity and talks about the things he has learned as a human being, a man and an Ojibway in his fifty-two years. Whether he’s writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, attending a sacred bundle ceremony or meeting Pierre Trudeau, he tells these stories in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese celebrates the learning journey his life has been.
	The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business	Wright Thompson	There is only one Wright Thompson. He is, as they say, famous if you know who he is: his work includes the most read articles in the history of ESPN (and it’s not even close) and has been anthologized in the Best American Sports Writing series ten times, and he counts John Grisham and Richard Ford among his ardent admirers (see back of book). But to say his pieces are about sports, while true as far as it goes, is like saying Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a book about a cattle drive. Wright Thompson figures people out. He jimmies the lock to the furnaces inside the people he profiles and does an analysis of the fuel that fires their ambition. Whether it be Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Pat Riley or Urban Meyer, he strips the away the self-serving myths and fantasies to reveal his characters in full. There are fascinating common denominators: it may not be the case that every single great performer or coach had a complex relationship with his father, but it can sure seem that way. And there is much marvelous local knowledge: about specific sports, and times and places, and people. Ludicrously entertaining and often powerfully moving, The Cost of These Dreams is an ode to the reporter’s art, and a celebration of true greatness and the high price that it exacts.
	When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
	Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End	Atul Gawande	Being Mortal looks at the way modern medicine has changed the experience of dying, what the implications of this change are for each of us, and what we would need to do to change a system that knows a lot about prolonging life but little about tending to death. At the heart of this book is something larger and more lasting than even its agenda for how to effect change: it is a deeply humane portrayal of how our society copes with who we really are. We are not economic beings. We are not political beings. We are not digital beings or analog beings, social beings or solitary beings. We are mortal beings. And in that is every important thing to know about how we must live.
	The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America	Thomas King	Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King’s critical and personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian” in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
	The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson	From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
	Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption	Bryan Stevenson	Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
	Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez	Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this insidious bias, in time, in money, and often with their lives.
	Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer	As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take “us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

Stats

Favourite Authors

Book	Author
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet	Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers
Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers
To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers
A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers
A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman
My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman
Britt-Marie Was Here	Fredrik Backman
Beartown	Fredrik Backman
Us Against You	Fredrik Backman
Anxious People	Fredrik Backman
The Winners	Fredrik Backman
Keeper’n Me	Richard Wagamese
Ragged Company	Richard Wagamese
Indian Horse	Richard Wagamese
Medicine Walk	Richard Wagamese
Starlight	Richard Wagamese
A Perfect Likeness	Richard Wagamese
Medicine River	Thomas King
Green Grass, Running Water	Thomas King
The Back of the Turtle	Thomas King
Indians on Vacation	Thomas King
Sufferance	Thomas King

Earth-based Spec Fic

Book	Author	Series
Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card	Ender’s Saga 1
Speaker for the Dead	Orson Scott Card	Ender’s Saga 2
Xenocide	Orson Scott Card	Ender’s Saga 3
Children of the Mind	Orson Scott Card	Ender’s Saga 4
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	Hitchhiker’s Guide 1
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe	Douglas Adams	Hitchhiker’s Guide 2
Life, the Universe and Everything	Douglas Adams	Hitchhiker’s Guide 3
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish	Douglas Adams	Hitchhiker’s Guide 4
Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	Oxford Time Travel #1
To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	Oxford Time Travel #2
Blackout	Connie Willis	Oxford Time Travel #3, All Clear #1
All Clear	Connie Willis	Oxford Time Travel #4, All Clear #2
The Three-Body Problem	Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 3	Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 1
The Dark Forest	Cixin Liu	Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 2
Death’s End	Cixin Liu	Remembrance of Earth’s Past - 3
Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 01
Caliban’s War	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 02
Abaddon’s Gate	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 03
Cibola Burn	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 04
Nemesis Games	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 05
Babylon’s Ashes	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 06
Persepolis Rising	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 07
Tiamat’s Wrath	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 08
Leviathan Falls	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - 09
Memory’s Legion	James S.A. Corey	The Expanse - novellas

Non-Earth Spec Fic Series

Book	Author	Series
The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	Broken Earth - 1
The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin	Broken Earth - 2
The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin	Broken Earth - 3
Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Hyperion Cantos - 01
The Fall of Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Hyperion Cantos - 02
Endymion	Dan Simmons	Hyperion Cantos - 03
The Rise of Endymion	Dan Simmons	Hyperion Cantos - 04
Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	Imperial Radch - 01
Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	Imperial Radch - 02
Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	Imperial Radch - 03
The Hobbit	JRR Tolkien	Lord of the Rings 0
The Fellowship of the Ring	JRR Tolkien	Lord of the Rings 1
The Two Towers	JRR Tolkien	Lord of the Rings 2
The Return of the King	JRR Tolkien	Lord of the Rings 3
A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine	Teixcalaan - 01
A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine	Teixcalaan - 02
Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee	The Machineries of Empire - 01
Raven Stratagem	Yoon Ha Lee	The Machineries of Empire - 02
Revenant Gun	Yoon Ha Lee	The Machineries of Empire - 03
All Systems Red	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 01
Artificial Condition	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 02
Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 03
Exit Strategy	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 04
Network Effect	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 05
Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells	The Murderbot Diaries - 06

Speculative Fiction

Book	Author
A Master of Djinn	P. Djeli Clark
An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon
Cloud Cuckoo Land	Anthony Doerr
Good Omens	Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell	Susanna Clarke
Kindred	Octavia E. Butler
Klara and the Sun	Kazuo Ishiguro
Migrations	Charlotte McConaghy
Moon of the Crusted Snow	Waubgeshig Rice
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
Neverwhere	Neil Gaiman
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke
Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel
Seveneves	Neal Stephenson
Shades of Grey	Jasper Fforde
Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel
The Graveyard Book	Neil Gaiman
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue	V.E. Schwab
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse	Louise Erdrich
The Left Hand Of Darkness	Ursula K Le Guin
The Martian	Andy Weir
The Road	Cormac McCarthy
The Stand	Stephen King
The Underground Railroad	Colson Whitehead
The Vanished Birds	Simon Jimenez

Contemporary Fiction

Book	Author
A Thousand Splendid Suns	Khaled Hosseini
All My Puny Sorrows	Miriam Toews
Brother	David Chariandy
Daughters of Smoke and Fire	Ava Homa
Disappearing Earth	Julia Phillips
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman
Empire Falls	Richard Russo
Everybody’s Fool	Richard Russo
Five Little Indians	Michelle Good
Go, Went, Gone	Jenny Erpenbeck
Greenwood	Michael Christie
Night of the Living Rez	Morgan Talty
Nobody’s Fool	Richard Russo
Once There Were Wolves	Charlotte McConaghy
Shuggie Bain	Douglas Stuart
Sweetness in the Belly	Camilla Gibb
The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel
The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt
The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois	Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The Overstory	Richard Powers
The Strangers	Katherena Vermette
There There	Tommy Orange
Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi
What Strange Paradise	Omar El Akkad

Historical Fiction

Book	Author
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry
A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles
All the Light We Cannot See	Anthony Doerr
Beloved	Toni Morrison
Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson
East of Eden	John Steinbeck
Half of a Yellow Sun	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi
Lonesome Dove	Larry McMurtry
Love Medicine	Louise Erdrich
Pachinko	Min Jin Lee
Purple Hibiscus	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Roots	Alex Haley
Such a Long Journey	Rohinton Mistry
The Book of Negroes	Lawrence Hill
The Brothers K	David James Duncan
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers
The Mountains Sing	Nguyen Phan Que Mai
The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead
The Night Watchman	Louise Erdrich
The Shadow King	Maaza Mengiste
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Vanishing Half	Brit Bennett
Underworld	Don DeLillo
Washington Black	Esi Edugyan

History / Memoir / Narrative

Book	Author
Blood in the Water	Heather Ann Thompson
Born a Crime	Trevor Noah
Dark Money	Jane Mayer
Educated	Tara Westover
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Patrick Radden Keefe
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Maya Angelou
Killers of the Flower Moon	David Grann
Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain
Know My Name	Chanel Miller
Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine	James Maskalyk
Living Brave: Lessons from Hurt, Lighting the Way to Hope	Shannon Dingle
Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family	Amanda Jette Knox
Midnight in Chernobyl	Adam Higginbotham
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea	Barbara Demick
One L	Scott Turow
One Native Life	Richard Wagamese
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers	Andy Greenberg
The Big Short	Michael Lewis
The Disordered Cosmos	Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
The North-West is Our Mother	Jean Teillet
They Said This Would Be Fun	Eternity Martis
Up Ghost River	Edmund Metatawabin
Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang

Social Justice

Book	Author
All Our Relations	Tanya Talaga
All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep	Andre Henry
Disability Visibility	Alice Wong +
Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space	Amanda Leduc
Four Hundred Souls	Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain +
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption	Bryan Stevenson
Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood	Frederick Joseph
Peace and Good Order	Harold R. Johnson
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present	Dara Horn
Policing Black Lives	Robyn Maynard
Seven Fallen Feathers	Tanya Talaga
So You Want to Talk About Race	Ijeoma Oluo
The Black Friend	Frederick Joseph
The Body is Not an Apology	Sonya Renee Taylor
The Fire This Time	Jesmyn Ward
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America	Thomas King
The New Jim Crow	Michelle Alexander
The Skin We’re In	Desmond Cole
The Truth About Stories	Thomas King
The Undocumented Americans	Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson
Unsettling Canada	Arthur Manuel
Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada	Diverlus, Rodney
We Have Always Been Here	Samra Habib
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race	Reni Eddo-Lodge

Science / Nature

Book	Author
A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey	Jonathan Meiburg
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End	Atul Gawande
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawdown	Paul Hawken
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures	Merlin Sheldrake
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest	Suzanne Simard
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses	Robin Wall Kimmerer
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez
Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey	James Rebanks
The Body: A Guide for Occupants	Bill Bryson
The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer	Charles Graeber
The Code Book	Singh, Simon
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer	Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Gene: An Intimate History	Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	Rebecca Skloot
The Invisible Kingdom	Meghan O’Rourke
The Redemption of Wolf 302	Rick McIntyre
The Reign of Wolf 21	Rick McIntyre
The Rise of Wolf 8	Rick McIntyre
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human	Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Wisdom of Wolves - Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack	Jim & Jamie Dutcher
Underland: A Deep Time Journey	Robert Macfarlane
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life	Lulu Miller

Other Non-Fiction

Book	Author
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life	George Saunders
Basketball (and Other Things)	Shea Serrano
Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History	Erik Malinowski
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life	Anne Lamott
Embers	Richard Wagamese
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid	Hofstadter, Douglas R.
How To Be Perfect	Michael Schur
If the Oceans were Ink	Carla Power
Impossible Owls	Brian Phillips
K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches	Tyler Kepner
Meander, Spiral, Explode	Jane Alison
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game	Michael Lewis
Movies (and Other Things)	Shea Serrano
One Story, One Song	Richard Wagamese
The Arm	Jeff Passan
The Baseball 100	Joe Posnanski
The Book of Basketball	Bill Simmons
The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business	Wright Thompson
The Monk of Mokha	Dave Eggers
The Only Rule Is It Has To Work	Ben Lindbergh & Sam Miller
The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking	Russell Carleton
The Soul of Baseball	Joe Posnanski
What is the What	Dave Eggers
Where Nobody Knows Your Name	John Feinstein
You’re a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass)	Mike McHargue

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Non-Fiction read since 2015

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